Saturday, February 7, 2009

I Play... GAME NOTES!

No pictures this week, and no game coming on Sunday (I'll be using the break to introduce the girlfriend to the foundations of modern horror... or, stuff I liked as a kid, either or: Halloween, Friday the 13th Part II, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Evil Dead II).

For the second week in a row, there was a PC fatality. This time it was more interesting. The valiant party of 5 (1st level) PCs and 2 hirelings wandered into a cave... and were attacked by 3 carrion crawlers. One by one the party succumbed to paralysis, until only one crawler and one PC remained... and... the PC fell.

I was ready to call it a TPK when a comment a player had made me realize... is one badly injured crawler going to eat everyone before anyone woke up? I checked the manual, because I didn't want to save them from a deserved fate and I didn't want to screw them. Neither Greyhawk nor the Monster Manual (the two references I had with me) listed a duration for paralysis with the monster description. I'd already gone with the "no damage/paralysis only" (I have no idea if the Greyhawk version is different) so it wouldn't be quickly gulping anything.

So I made a ruling. The PCs will begin to wake up... only after one character was dead. The badly wounded critter would definitely begin feasting on someone. I rolled a d8. Each character, PC and NPC, was assigned a number. 8 means reroll. The roll determines who dies.

And... Gnarly the Dwarf, veteran of every Olden Domain session to date, and not far from 2nd level... had his face munched off (easiest place to chow down on someone wearing plate armor, no?).

What an ungrateful bastard I am, too. This past week he had received a Creature Generator he'd ordered online someplace and had me sign it before the session started. No good deed goes unpunished, I guess.

RIP Gnarly. And that was how the session ended. The rest of the crew awoke during the following several rounds and took down the badly injured critter.

There was also fun earlier on in a moldy room where pretty much every action meant a save vs death by spores, but they'd taken so many precautions that I ruled that they'd fail the save only on a roll of 1 or 2 (just 1 for the dwarves). Watching them take so many chances and roll that 20 sider so many times since the chances were so heavily in their favor... that was really cool and suspenseful. No fatalities there.

In other news, one of my other players is a fantastic artist (I'd seen some of his sketches, but I saw an in-progress work he's doing OH MY GOD)... looks like he's doing stuff for Fight On! now. If that comes together, and the player in my other campaign indeed releases some of his old dungeons as he's thinking of doing, in addition to the Insect Shrine artist Laura doing artwork for the upcoming Fight On! as well... I think I'll have nothing to be ashamed about contributing to this little Renaissance of ours... not only a decent little product that I've somehow managed to get into retail distribution, but getting talent into the creative pool as well. Rock, rock on!

Hey, your story is much cooler if you consider that paralysis is not the same thing as unconsciousness. Those paralyzed PCs may well have been awake the whole time, but helpless. So Gnarly had his face munched off while feeling everything, and the other PCs had to watch it happen. My guess is they'll be running from carrion crawlers waaay past 10th level.

It was a randomly generated encounter using a more sophisticated version of the tables here. Also, these crawlers had only one attack per round so there wasn't an "auto-hit" every round.

>>Hey, your story is much cooler if you consider that paralysis is not the same thing as unconsciousness.

I do believe I'd established paralysis, if not in this enounter then in another, as making the victim drop and convulse. In the middle of combat I'm often more concerned with "whose turn is it now?" than dramatic depictions of the damage that was just rolled - the abstract and *fast* nature of old D&D combat is the main attraction to me, and going into detail about what each action is defeats both points I think.